by Jeremy Reed
Rimbaud suggests a universe on each outgoing breath. In his mind he is in a whitewashed, subterranean room. What is that room really like? You cannot get into someone’s head to find that out, and he can tell you only by means of the visual image. The narrator here anticipates existential absurdity. Newspapers and meaningless books kill time; they are a sedative against what man fears most — the unlimited duration of the future. Above him is the red and black mud of the city, but before he can reach the surface there are the substrata of the imagination to be encountered. Inner space informs the poet of azure pits and flaming wells. Everything is possible there — ‘moons and comets, seas and fables meet’. There is a compensation to be derived from creative depression, in that it often has the imagination realize an alternative world. Rimbaud imagines new planets, ‘sapphire and metal balls’. And given the freedom of inner space, he is paranoid about external intrusions. What is going on out there while the poet is concentrated upon himself? Even the smallest thing takes on menacing proportions. ‘Why should the appearance of an aperture turn pale at the corner of the ceiling?’ When you are on drugs, any random detail that arrests the attention may be magnified into an event of universal significance. Les Illuminations is full of these intimations of paranoid stress. The drug is one state of unreality, the poem another, so that at a double remove from externals vulnerability is heightened. The genius of Rimbaud for creating worlds carries with it the corresponding disappointment that he has invented a paper bird rather than one which is going to fly. Ink is absorbed by paper, no matter the imaginative reach of thought. But all the same he challenges those on the outside: ‘Qu’est mon néant, auprès de la stupeur qui vous attend?’ (‘What is my void compared with the stupefaction awaiting you?’) And who would presume to take up that challenge?
In ‘Vies’ from Les Illuminations Rimbaud exemplifies the characteristics of the omnipotent mage. His claims are similar to those which he was to recount in retrospect in Une saison en enfer. Having told us ‘A flight of scarlet pigeons thunders across my thoughts’, he proceeds to magnify his attributes. His writing vindicates his youth — how else could he know so much other than by the acquisition of power through the imagination?
In a loft in which I was shut up when I was twelve, I understood the world, I illustrated the human comedy. In a cellar I learnt history. At a night celebration in a northern city I met all the wives of old painters. In a Paris alley I was taught the classical sciences. In a magnificent building surrounded by the Orient, I finished my huge work and spent my celebrated retirement. I set fire to my blood. I am released from my duty. I must give up all thought of it. I really am from beyond the grave, and without work.
The unorthodox manner of achieving knowledge and vision is one calculated to enrage pragmatists. Rimbaud had found in the imagination a faculty that undercut intellectual conventions. Moreover, he speaks as one who is reincarnated — he can remember finishing his immense work in the Orient. The building in which he lived suggests that he was rich then, and poor now. What he gained in another incarnation must be carried on at great suffering to the poet. The gifts carried forward are part of an invisible heritage. They are activated by memory: and recall is one of the chief constituents of the imaginative process.
In Les Illuminations Rimbaud is all the time telescoping vision into possible fictions that reduce the universe to something containable. Because the imagination is inexhaustibly expansive, the poet has in some way to shoot it down like a low-flying aircraft. And in the process he shoots himself down. He is the blackened survivor who finds himself on a beach at the end of the world. But the place is one he has imagined. There might be a single white villa cut into the cliff; a gold lion standing on the headland, a woman with a swathe of blonde hair playing the piano at the water’s edge. Where is that? For the poet it is a place called home. And it is located in a habitable inner space.
Rimbaud gets to the lost country in so many ways. Sometimes it is situated beneath a lake or in the sky, or it becomes specific by reduction. And it is always the visual quality of his work which allows the imaginative to be located in the physical.
When the world has been reduced to a single dark wood for our dazzled eyes — to a beach for two faithful children — to a musical house for our clear understanding — I shall find you.
When there is only a single old man left on earth, serene and beautiful, living in unimaginable luxury — I shall be at your feet.
When I have realized all your memories, when I am the girl who can bind your hands — I shall suffocate you. (‘Phrases’, op. cit.)
What Rimbaud possesses is the film-maker’s art. In order to focus on the image, he reduces the world to what can be contained within the poetic lens. There is nothing else for viewing but ‘a single dark wood’, a still that excludes all other detail. And the sequence follows on in a series of frames: ‘a beach for two faithful children’ and then ‘a musical house for our clear understanding’. One: two: three. Each image creates a consecutive microcosm. You can get there in the imagination by easy jumps; and this is how good poetry functions. When the visual landscape becomes peopled, it is with a clearly identified solitary — ‘a single old man’ — who is the sole occupant of Rimbaud’s metaphoric planet. And part of his own insecurity, his search for a father-figure, is evident in his supplication to this man of unimaginable wealth. But having achieved the realization of sharing this last man’s memories, Rimbaud by an abrupt mutation of gender becomes the girl who binds the man’s hands and suffocates him.
Rimbaud and Verlaine. Verlaine and Rimbaud. What was happening to them? London and the British Museum; the at-tempt to learn English sufficient for them to teach French to private pupils. Always the need to keep on top of things so as to conceal their respective imbalances. With that in mind, Verlaine wrote to Emile Blémont:
...We are learning English accordingly, Rimbaud and I, in Edgar Poe, in collections of popular songs, in Robertson, etc. etc. And also in shops, bars, libraries. We are gluing up our mouths to aid our pronunciation. Most days we go for long walks into the suburbs and countryside, Kew, Woolwich, etc., for we are familiar with London now. Drury Lane, Whitechapel, Pimlico, Angel, the City and Hyde Park, no longer hold the attraction of the unknown.
By April, both men had left London. Verlaine, who was still in a state of equivocal emotional turmoil over his wife, went off to stay with an aunt at Jehonville in Belgium. Rimbaud, who was without money and sufficient English for him to remain by himself in London, departed to join his family in Roche. It was still another return in a pattern that did not allow for alternatives. Boredom, a flatland, the iron stove of a mother, a farm at Roche worn to a state of disrepair, and above all the huge isolation, all of these things provided the negative charge that Rimbaud countered by writing Une saison en enfer. He arrived at Roche on Good Friday, 11 April. He brought with him no credentials. He had no book to show, no security in life, his relationship had been with a man and so could not be talked about; he was once again penniless. Regarded by his family as a degenerate urchin, how he must have fumed! All they were concerned with was the loss of a stable and barn which had burnt down, and a tenant farmer who had left without paying the rent. Rimbaud’s sister Vitalie recorded his home-coming in her diary:
That day was to mark an epoch in my life, for it saw an event of profound significance. My second brother arrived home without warning. I can still see myself in our room, where my brother, sister and mother were arranging some of our things. We heard a light knock on the door. I went to answer it. . . imagine my surprise, I found myself face to face with Arthur. When we had recovered from the first moments of astonishment, he explained to us the reason for his visit; we were delighted, and he participated in our pleasure. We spent the day together, showing Arthur the farm, which he hardly knew.
Rimbaud’s return was not so much a home-coming as an enforced necessity. He returned home when he was either desperate or frightened. And he was certainly the latter. Drug a
ddiction and the pathological symptoms of withdrawal were little understood at this time. Laudanum, which includes tincture of opium, was used as a general anodyne in the nineteenth century. Coleridge, De Quincey, Baudelaire and many others became hooked on opium after first using it as a sedative or pain-killer. Rimbaud used drugs as still another incentive to vision. Lack of bodily awareness and any literature on dependency made the taking of hard drugs seem an experiment without liability. Withdrawal clinics were to be a thing of the future.
Rimbaud had to write Une saison en enfer as part of the process of detoxification. He had to suffer the attendant symptoms at Roche: muscular contraction, hallucination, panic, thirst, paranoia, delirium. So far as we know, he lay on his bed all day, refused to eat, suffered constant insomnia and was remote, withdrawn into his inner conflict. He probably tramped around the nearby countryside, confused by what was happening to him, unable to seek medical help and raging against the misfortune that had reduced him to such a state of intense suffering. It was at this time that he began work on Une saison en enfer, ostensibly with the hope of earning himself some money from a short prose book, but also with the intention of externalizing his madness, his poetic method. And by 1873 Rimbaud had authority. At eighteen he was able to look back on a devotion to poetry so intense that in its short duration it seemed to have carried a past inheritance and to extend into an illimitable future. Rimbaud’s valediction to poetry establishes the premises for a post-millennial, twenty-first-century poetics.
Verlaine was at Jehonville. His life was ruined. Rimbaud was at Roche. He was burning in a crucible of pain. When he smashed the wall, he broke his hand open. Blood. He did not want to shout. His sister’s shadow was outside the door, too frightened to knock. Faces seen at the London docks flashed up. Now he knew. They too were hooked. Grey faces. Contracted pupils. The shakes. DELIRIUM. Image after image. Constriction of the diaphragm. Irregular heart-beat, his breathing laboured. Nausea. Pain turning in on pain. Conscious or unconscious, the same hallucinated threat. A wolf licked his face; a jackal eviscerated him. Now they were speaking outside. His mother, the police, Verlaine. Verlaine was showing them the knife-marks on his chest. They were throwing sand over his body. Burying him in this room. Sand that would seal up his mouth, pour out of his nostrils.
Something of Rimbaud’s state of mind at this time is expressed in a letter he wrote to Delahaye in May, a month after his arrival at Roche:
What a shit hole! and what naïve monsters these peasants are. At night, if you want a drink, you have to walk miles. The mother has sunk me in this hellish place.
I don’t know how to get out of it: but I shall. I miss that atrocious Charlestown, the [Café] Universe, the library, etc... I am working quite steadily though; I am writing little prose stories, general title: Pagan Book or Negro Book. It is crazy and innocent. 0 innocence! innocence, innocence, innoc... shit!
Verlaine must have imposed on you the unenviable task of arguing with Devin, the printer of the Nôress. I think this Devin could do Verlaine’s book reasonably and quite satisfactorily. (As long as he doesn’t use the shitty type that goes into his newspaper. He’s even capable of pasting an advertisement on it!)
I have nothing more to tell you, the contemplation of nature fills up my arse. I am yours, o Nature, o my mother!
Hope to see you soon. I am doing everything I can to make a reunion possible.
R.
I’ve reopened my letter. Verlaine seems to have proposed a rendezvous for Sunday the 18th, in Boulion. I can’t go. If you do, he will probably give you some prose pieces of mine or his, for safe return.
Mother Rimb. will return to Charlestown some time in June. This is certain, and I shall try to stay in that pretty town for a while.
The sun is incandescent, no matter the freezing mornings. The day before yesterday I went to see the Prussians at Vouziers, a subprefecture of 10,000 people, seven kilom. from here. That cheered me up.
I am out of my mind. Not a book, not a bar within reach, not even a street incident. What a horror the French countryside is! My future depends on this book, for which half a dozen stories have still to be invented. How can I invent atrocities here? I can’t send you any of the stories, although I already have three, that costs too much! That’s it for now...
At the time of writing this letter, Rimbaud was far from renouncing the idea of literature. Presumably he looked to the embryonic book as a source of income that would allow him to write and travel. It was not until the autumn of 1873 that he turned against the source of his inspiration. Something of the naivety that counterbalanced his extraordinary precocity is manifested in his youthful hope that his Negro Book would sell.
Even Charleville, the provincial town that Rimbaud so loathed, seemed an oasis compared with the desolate flatlands around Roche. Rimbaud was fuming, and he wrote his best when his inner momentum reached a pitch of violence. He seems to have written ‘Mauvais sang’ and ‘Alchimie du verbe’, two of the most potent constituents of Une saison en enfer, during this period of withdrawal. ‘Mauvais sang’ is furiously confessional, its strength lying in the interleaving of fiction and auto-biography. Rimbaud creates both a mythic and a real self and both are imaginative projections. It is impossible to write about the self without lying. Language creates its own fiction, it is both a centring in truth and an instrument of deflection. And above all it creates associations within the work, the metaphorical leaps that function within a field of their own autonomous making.
...On the roads, on winter nights, without shelter, without clothes, without bread, a voice gripped my frozen heart: ‘Weakness or strength: you exist, that is strength. You don’t know where you are going or why you are going, go in everywhere, answer everything. They won’t kill you any more than if you were a corpse.’ In the morning I had so vacant a look and such a dead face, that those I met perhaps did not see me. In cities, the mud would suddenly appear red and black, like a mirror when a lamp in the next room moves, like a treasure in the forest! Good luck, I cried, and I saw a sea of flames and smoke in the sky; and, to right, to left, all wealth detonated like a billion thunderbolts...
Something of Rimbaud’s openness to all experience and the self-questioning voice he encountered in the conflict between I and the other is brought out here in his fearless confrontation with the unknown. He is the prophet passing through cities. His magical properties and dissipation are such that he goes invisible. And wherever he goes, there are signs: the sky breaks into flames. Over his shoulder he observes the pyrotechnic combustion of thunderbolts. He hallucinates the fiction of his becoming. His vengeance is upon capitalism, that system which denies the individual the right to live by means of creative choice and expression, and instead demands that he prostitutes himself to an institution for money. Rimbaud’s rage is the measure of the suffering he has undergone in order to pursue his life as a voyant. A poet’s survival is chance if he remains true to his calling.
…Yes, my eyes are closed to your light. I am an animal, a negro. But I can be saved. You are false negroes, maniacs, savages, misers all of you. Merchant, you are a nigger; magistrate, you are a nigger; general, you are a nigger; emperor, scabby old faggot, you are a nigger: you have drunk untaxed liquor from Satan’s still. — This people is inspired by fever and cancer. Invalids and old men are so respectable that they ask to be boiled. — The best thing is to leave this continent where madness prowls searching for hostages for these wretches. I will enter into the true kingdom of the sons of Ham.
Rimbaud is always moving on; not even poetry can restrain him, anchor him to any sense of territory gained. He is always in the process of leaving. The world is too small even when it is multiplied by the imagination. And this hunger for new worlds which informs his poetry expresses not only a dissatisfaction with his provincial upbringing but an objection to the limitations imposed by the universe. And Une saison en enfer reflects Rim-baud’s impatience with almost every line won. He is bored by the image he has minted. His rea
ction is immediately to attack it. He is forever severing the link by which the snake’s head intersects with its tail.
In the six weeks that Rimbaud was at Roche, with Verlaine across the border, he was creating by way of the method he was in the process of renouncing. In ‘Mauvais sang’ he writes: ‘Boredom no longer attracts me. Rage, debauchery, madness, of which I know all the elations and disasters, — my whole burden is laid aside. Without losing our minds, let us evaluate the extent of my innocence. I should no longer find comfort in asking to be whipped. I have embarked on a wedding with Jesus Christ as father-in-law.’
Rimbaud writes with the authority of one who has suffered and entered into all possible states of derangement. And there is such huge isolation in his undertaking. His contemporaries were busy writing verse, that rational undertaking which operates within the approved boundaries of social consciousness. Rimbaud sat in the centre of the circle in flames. As a schoolboy he had seen through the limitations of that conventional effete — the man who retires to the comfort of his study and therapeutically devotes an occasional hour of emotional disquiet to the composition of poetry. He could ridicule these men because they had risked nothing, and, even if his life entailed rejection and anonymity, he had lived. He had walked through the furnace shrieking: ‘I am alive in ways that you will never know.’
In ‘Alchimie du verbe’ Rimbaud relates ‘L’histoire d’une de mes folies’. The poem is an exegesis of his self-induced supraconscious faculties. Rimbaud tells us, in so far as he can ever eliminate deception, of his poetic discoveries. Written in the past tense, it is the most extraordinary summation of a revolutionary poetics.
